Elizabeth Durack's work goes on show

KERRY O'BRIEN: Two years ago, one of Australia's most-acclaimed artists, Elizabeth Durack, died in Perth at the age of 84.

She gained fame as one of the first white artists to adopt indigenous painting techniques.

But decades later, in 1997, Elizabeth Durack sparked a bitter artistic row when she admitted entering her works in an Aboriginal art exhibition under the name of Eddie Burrup.

Now her daughter Perpetua has assembled an exhibition of her mother's work - some never before seen in public - which she hopes will re-emphasise a remarkable artistic legacy.

Alison Wright reports from Perth.

PERPETUA DURACK, CURATOR: It was soon after she died, um, and that was, for me, a big personal change of course both emotionally and - but then there was the avalanche of the work that is around this old studio of hers.

And, um, confronted with it, I really - I wasn't going to walk away.

I was going to deal with it.

ALISON WRIGHT: In the months following her mother's death, Perpetua Durack immersed herself in the legacy of Elizabeth Durack's work.

Retracing seven decades of her mother's career became a journey of discovery.

PERPETUA DURACK: There was in a number of these plan cabinets, in the drawers, a lot of works on paper from the late '40s that neither my brother or I had seen before.

We were familiar with some of them, but there were a lot we hadn't seen.

ALISON WRIGHT: The Duracks loom large in Western Australian history as one of the pastoral dynasties who pioneered the Kimberley region.

Elizabeth's grandfather Patrick established enormous cattle stations from NSW through Queensland and into WA.

The Duracks also contributed to the country's cultural landscape.

Elizabeth's sister Mary authored 'Kings in Grass Castles', the story of how the Durack dynasty began, a window in on white Australian settlement.

And it was Elizabeth's art that also shed light on this period.

PERPETUA DURACK: It's, um, a set of 20 water colour works and some of the preliminary drawings, there's about 15 drawings too, and they were all created on Ivanhoe station in the east Kimberley just after the war.

ALISON WRIGHT: Despite her long and accomplished career, the enduring memory of Elizabeth Durack is overshadowed by the Eddie Burrup controversy five years ago.

Back in 1997 she explained to the 7:30 Report this pseudonym gave her another avenue to express her artistic self.

ELIZABETH DURACK, ARTIST: It's certainly something living for me at the present time and causing me to have this burst of latter day, almost you might say, creativity, and also a great enjoyment in what I'm doing.

ROBERT EGGINGTON, ARTIST: Elizabeth Durack doesn't have any right as a non-Aboriginal woman to talk about how we feel.

ALISON WRIGHT: Perpetua Durack believes the subtle shades of her mother's life and work has been lost.

And she's now trying to bring back to life the drawings and paintings of a time most Australians never experienced and few remember.

PERPETUA DURACK: There's nothing like it on record in WA or Australia, for that matter, of - of outback Australia in that period.

DR MAUREEN SMITH, ART CRITIC: Elizabeth's always took the landscape and the connectedness of the Aboriginal people to the landscape as the focal point for her art.

When other people were looking outside of Australia to other traditions, Elizabeth always looked internally.

She became most familiar with the Durack art when she worked at the University of WA and says its value was written off too quickly.

DR MAUREEN SMITH: To record the collision of two cultures, the tribal culture of which she was very much embedded with her love of the Aboriginal people and also the white pastoral culture.

And so she recorded the tumult of that collision.

ALISON WRIGHT: As the work is carefully prepared for its public release, it's an anxious time for Perpetua Durack.

She hopes her efforts might lead others to a better understanding of Elizabeth Durack and perhaps a renewed appreciation of her legacy.

PERPETUA DURACK: I suppose one of the aspects of this exhibition that's going to take -- that will open in a few weeks, is to show that it was really part of the whole evolution of her art, that it had been there from the beginning, as it were.

It's what I feel needs to be done and I feel fortunate that I'm able to do it.

DR MAUREEN SMITH: I don't think there has been a full assessment of Elizabeth Durack's works, and I hope that this exhibition may be the beginning of that because she -- those 80 years that she recorded are quite amazing when you look at the full openness of her work.